


The Greatest Place I've Ever Been

by sleepyempress



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Ambiguous Relationships, F/F, Guns, Sad Ending, award shows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 03:29:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3159548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepyempress/pseuds/sleepyempress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You can never find the right word for your relationship, can never figure out the most convenient packaging to present it to the outside world, and it stops mattering. The two of you reached some tacit understanding long ago. Even as the world goes to hell, that is enough." </p><p>Title and introductory quote taken from "Sober" by Broods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Greatest Place I've Ever Been

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bramblePatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/gifts).



Just one break in the year  
When it's all about the two of us  
And nothing's ever been so good  
You remember a life  
That was all about the two of us  
But you and I, we never knew  
  
It was the greatest place I've ever been  
And it was right in front of me   
You carried me back home again  
Where you became it all for me

 

* * *

 You meet her in the bathroom at the Academy Awards.

 When it starts being long ago enough to reminisce about, you can’t remember which year it was. You’ll go to several of these awards ceremonies, and some Grammies and Golden Globes besides, but this one must have been one of the earlier ones. Yes, it was one of the earlier ones, because Strider was still very stringent about you attending. At that point he’d been nominated numerous times but had yet to win, and he hadn’t learned how to keep the rejection from gnawing at him.

 You hadn’t learned not to wear black velvet to these sort of events, that Los Angeles was Los Angeles, even in the winter, and whatever the Dolby Theater is doing regarding climate control still leaves you uncomfortable. 

 That’s probably why you went to the bathroom in the first place, to slide off the shoulders of your dress, dab at your armpits with paper towels, apply perfume as needed, touch up your lipstick for good measure. The voyage to the ladies’ room involves navigating through seas of famous people with their famous bodies and expensive outfits--the show proper has yet to start, damn it--but you are blessedly invisible. This must have been when your books still only circulated among lit critics, occult enthusiasts, amateur wizards. 

 A quick mirror check in the similarly crowded bathroom reveals that you are a little less sweaty and frazzled than you feel, but you grab paper towels and pat yourself dry in the privacy of a bathroom stall regardless. You’re reapplying your lipstick (matte black, always matte black) in the mirror, sandwiched between two aspiring actresses, when you feel a light tap on your back. You turn around with more speed and less grace than you anticipated--one of the aforementioned actresses makes some noise of protest--to meet the most disarming smile you have ever seen.

 “Your tag was sticking out,” the woman says, still smiling. She’s taller and indeterminately older than you, with enormous glasses and a mane of dark hair.

 “Oh,” you say quietly.

 “I like your dress,” she says. Then she starts, as if remembering something, and turns on her heel, the train of her own black dress glittering green in her wake. 

 “Did you see her legs? She doesn’t shave!” one actress says in outrage to another, but their voices are quiet and distant. 

 The place between your shoulders where her fingers brushed still tingles.  

* * *

 It’s a relief, hours later, to slide into the back of Strider’s limo. You can’t remember if this was the time he finally won best director, or if the paparazzi were still in the habit of shouting invasive questions about the nature of your relationship (“are you two related or what?!”), but the only sound in the car is what you assume is the hippest rap music as Dave stares out his tinted window, face inscrutable under what will become his signature sunglasses. 

 “Who was that woman, the tall one in the black dress who came up with the group for best special effects?”

 “Huh?”

 “The one with the glasses and long hair.”

 “Shit, Lalonde, you can’t recognize Jade English? Have you been living under a rock for the past five years?”

 “Working on a manuscript in one’s tiny New York apartment is about the same thing, yes. But answer my question.”

 “She probably made your computer.  And your tablet. And your phone. Assuming this hermit shtick of yours is an act and you still have that shit. ”

 “Oh.”

* * *

The rest of the evening is a blur of at least three different after parties, wine glasses and champagne flutes with your lipstick on them, enough alcohol to make your ears feel warm. You can’t remember if it’s at the Vanity Fair one or the Governor’s Ball or the one hosted by the actor Dave is attempting to sweet talk into starring in his next movie (the one that finally wins him the Oscar? can’t remember). 

 You do know it was at the point where you’d gotten comfortably drunk and said the requisite amount of things to the requisite amount of people to be able to sit on the nearest abandoned sofa and take out the current knitting project and work out a few rows--drunken knitting that will probably need to be ripped out once you get over the inevitable hangover, but who’s keeping score?--when you see her again.

 She’s still in her glittery dress, talking animatedly to some suit types with a cocktail glass in her hand. The room is too dark and she’s too far away for you to determine if she really doesn’t shave her legs, and be it alcohol or fate, you find yourself picking up yarn and needles and walking over to her.

 And you watch her, you watch _Jade English excuse herself_ from important-looking people to come talk to you, you Rose Lalonde, who has yet to publish even a _facet_ of her magnum opus, when she could be doing dozens of more important things.

 “Hello again,” she says. “How are you holding up?”

 “Better, after a couple drinks.”

She chuckles, and you can see the delicate crow’s feet that form at the corner of her eyes. “Would you like to get some fresh air?”

 “Yes, please,” you say, almost too emphatically. 

 The patio is quieter, tastefully lit, overlooking some swath of Hollywood. You make some small talk not worth remembering, enjoying the cooler night air. 

 “How’d you end up here?” she asks. “You don’t seem the Hollywood type--no offense!”

“Do you know Dave Strider?” Jade pauses to think. “I’m with him.”

 “With him...?” 

 “We’re friends.”

 It’s difficult to explain your relationship with Strider, even away from flashbulbs and probing questions. You’d describe him as your only friend if you were interested in being emotionally vulnerable with strangers. You met him while you were still finishing one of your masters and he was still in New York, an instant friendship that makes no logical sense. When you’re being philosophical about the whole thing, it’s almost like you knew him from some place or time before you met. But at the moment, you are not philosophical.

 “It’s nice of you to come out and support him,” she says.

 “Where is your entourage?” you ask.

 “Few of them are the partying type.”

 “And you are?”

 “Someone has to take one for the team.” She smiles wryly and leans her head back. “Too bad it’s too bright to see the stars.”

 “Oh?”

 “I love space,” she says, her smile deepening. “If things had been different, I might have been a physicist. Or a rocket scientist. Or an astronaut. But I doubt anyone would want an old lady astronaut right now.”

 “I beg to differ,” you say, and this time, you catch yourself smiling.

You hear music wafting in from the thick of the party.

 Jade snaps her head back to face you. “I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to ask you your name!”

 “Rose. Rose Lalonde.”

 “Well, Rose Lalonde, would you like to dance with me?”

 She offers her hand to you, and you’re swept into a drunken cross between a waltz and a slow dance. You don’t know how long the two of you stay like that, but eventually your head droops onto her shoulder, cushioned by a mane of dark hair lightly peppered with grey.

 Her legs are, indeed, very hairy. 

* * *

 Sometime that night, in between being chauffeured to other parties with an increasingly drunk Strider, she asks for your phone number. You fish out your phone from your purse, disentangle it from you knitting, and she smiles when you place it in her hands. 

 “One of mine,” she giggles like a woman half her age.

 “Really?”

 “Yep,” she says as she begins tapping at the touch screen. She hands it back to you. “Let me know if I can do anything for you. Or if you just want to talk. I want you to tell me about the books you’re working on.”

 “Didn’t you want my number?”

 She wraps an arm around your shoulder and hands your phone back. “I looked it up on your phone,” she says. You swear you can hear the wink in her voice.  

* * *

 A few pictures of the two of you surface towards the back of a few online Oscar photo galleries. Strider uncharacteristically offers no clever jabs, though you suspect he may still be busy sulking or otherwise screenwriting or whatever else it is that he does. 

You, meanwhile, bury yourself in your current manuscript, drink your weight in black tea, and try to work your way through writer’s block by scratching behind your cat’s ears.

 And you talk to Jade. 

 You soon discover that she added her name to your phone as “jade english!!! :)” and as much as the lack of proper capitalization bothers you, you can’t bring yourself to change it. Instead you talk--text at first, slowly and intermittently. You exchange e-mail addresses. You start talking to her about  the progress on the book, which at this juncture you still had yet to title, and she talks about electronics conferences, engineering terms you keep having to google, the meteor shower she hopes she’ll be able to catch if she can get back from the conference from Shanghai in time. 

 Months pass this way. You tell her about New York, about how frustrating it is to finish and block the shawl you’re knitting, interesting articles in that psychology journal you still subscribe to, even about your weird, isolated childhood. You tell her some things you haven’t even told Dave, and sometimes you call her just to hear the ever-changing voicemail messages she records, just to hear her talk again.

 She invites you to one of these electronics conferences, and you go, frantically scribbling the later parts of _Complacency of the Learned_ (it finally, blessedly, got a title) in longhand during every spare moment you can muster. You go out to dinner one night, just the two of you, and as you walk back to the car that night you look up and-- _yes!_ \--the stars are out.

* * *

 People say many things about _Complacency_ when it comes out, some of them ignorant, some of them thoroughly impolite, but the sales figures skyrocket regardless. “ _Your weird-ass book finally did it_ ,” Strider writes you, “ _Welcome to the big time._ ”  By this time he’s garnered no small modicum of fame himself (he’s on the cover of _Time_ within the year), and sometimes you go all the way out to LA to laze around that weird house of his and meet some of his celebrity friends, who now have an idea of who you are.

 Jade is ecstatic for you, vocally so, and writes an impassioned if confused response after speed-reading your book. She calls you in the middle of the night for you but is early afternoon in whatever country she decided to go backpacking in, forgetting time zones in her excitement.

 You yourself are on the cover of  _Time_  within a year and a half.

 You feel big but also small. Your apartment feels too small, and you wonder how you could ever breathe, much less write, in this obsessively organized mousehole.  You go to cafes and spend two hours drinking a single glass of wine. You go to parks and lie on your back in the grass, staring at the sky. You drink enough coffee to make your ears buzz and fingers twitch. None of it makes you feel any less trapped.

“What do I do with my royalties?” you remember asking Dave after the first checks come in. 

 “Fuck if I know,” he tells you. “Take a goddamned vacation, Lalonde.” 

 So you do. You go to England, Spain, Cuba, Russia, and South Africa within the span of half a year, a notebook as your only traveling companion, but it’s coming home that never feels right.

 This solution comes to you on your own. A change of scenery. You buy the farmhouse upstate on a slightly inebriated lark, hire people to gut and renovate it. The paint is barely dry on the walls when you visit, and for the first time in a year, you feel you can truly relax. The cat stretches languidly the moment he’s released from his carrier, and you realize you feel like writing again.

 You know instantly Jade needs to be here too.

 She jumps at the offer but worries her schedule will preclude her from joining you, until she drives up on her own in the middle of the night. Her knock nearly gives you a heart attack, and her ferocious greeting hug almost gives you another, better one.

 You stay up talking until the dawn, then put on one of your Bach playlists and fall asleep on the furniture. The way the sunlight seeps through the new, enormous windows in this place still amazes you, and you feel in love with such a multitude of things. 

* * *

“Would you like to go hunting?” she asks you later in the afternoon.

 “What?”

 “Do you want to go hunting?” she repeats herself.

 “I’ve never shot a gun,” you say.

 She grins. “I can fix that,” she says, as she motions you to follow her. She leads you to your driveway and the forest green, mud-spattered truck parked in it, opens the back door, and takes out a rifle. You follow her back around the house to your enormous back yard. You still quite haven’t figured out how many of these rolling, pine-filled acres are yours yet, much less explored them, but Jade seems intensely eager at the prospect. 

 The back yard proper has been landscaped somewhat, and she picks out a nearby tree.

 “Okay,” she says, as she unslings the rifle and gently hands it to you, “this’ll be good.” Then her hands are on your hips, then your shoulders, nudging you into a proper stance. She checks your arms, nudging the one supporting the butt of the rifle higher, hand cradled between the stock and trigger guard, adjusting the other on the forestock. 

 “How’s it feel?” she asks.

 “Like I’m at bat.”

 “Good, that’s how it’s supposed to work.” She glances at the tree you’re supposed to be targeting. “Now aim the sights at the middle of that tree trunk.” 

 Your arms feel horribly weak and wobbly, but you do as Jade tells you. You feel her behind you, her arms lightly wrapping around yours. “Now,” she says softly into your ear, “press gently on the trigger when you’re ready.” 

 You do so, and you nearly jump out of your skin when the gun actually fires. 

 “It used to make me jump, too,” Jade says as she squeezes your shoulders. Then her attention focuses to the tree trunk. “Look, you hit it.”

 “Sharpshooter Rose Lalonde,” you say wryly.

 “So, do you want to go hunting?”

 You slowly lower the gun and hand it back to her. “No, I think I have a manuscript calling my name.”

 “Do you mind if I go hunting on your property?” she asks, eyes sparkling.

 “Go ahead.”

 She goes back to the truck to get a few more supplies, and you carry your laptop out to the back yard and watch her scamper off. You write until it starts drizzling, at which point you go back inside, still sneaking glances at the back yard through the window.

 The rain has let off by the time you hear the echo of a gunshot, then another, and then, a few seconds later, another, then some kind of celebratory whooping, and you go outside to see what the commotion is.

 You watch her run down the hill, dead turkey swinging in her hand, and it’s like you’re seeing her for the first time. So much before has been a carefully controlled artifice, fake and polite for convention’s sake. Here, she is free, her feet bare and hair wild, her hairy legs threatening to roll out from under her, with the speed and agility of someone decades younger. She’s like a bird, like a deer, like a wolf, like a chimera of animals you’re too transfixed to attempt to figure out. 

 “Dinner!” she shouts as she waves the thing above her head.

 She cleans and guts the thing herself, then helps you get it set up in the oven. 

“Where’d you learn how to do all that?” you ask as you set the kitchen timer.

 “It was a teenage rebellion thing,” she says, smiling darkly.

 By this point in your life, you’ve been to some magnificently fancy dinners, but you are certain that this is the best meal you have ever had.

* * *

 Too soon Jade has to leave, then you have to leave to visit with your agent. Your apartment is still suffocating, the city is still suffocating, and you go back to the house upstate as soon as you can. Strider comes out one weekend--you feel you owe him--and spends much of his time making weird Vines, some of which you assist in the creation of. This probably leads to a new wave of speculation about the two of you being romantically involved, which the two of you enjoy laughing off as you work your way through the better part of Tommy Wiseau’s filmography. Dave insists it’s research a nd falls asleep on your couch. 

 Soon you’re spending every weekend up there, then half of every week, then every other week, then half a month at a time.

 “Just sell the damn NYC shithole,” Strider texts you one evening, and you do.

 You tell Jade after the deed is done, after all your things have been shipped over from the city. At first she responds with a string of exclamation points, then she explains she’s booked a flight to come see you again.

 You can’t sleep until she arrives. 

* * *

 In retrospect, you can’t remember all of what you do in those languid, beautiful weeks in that beautiful house. You know you finalized yet another novel, sent it off, but most of what you remember is watching the sunrises and sunsets through your window, making tea, drinking wine, listening to classical music or the radio.  Sometimes you watch Animal Planet with Jade and inevitably end up muting the TV, as she always has much better stories.

 It feels wrong to let her sleep on the couch, when you have a queen-sized bed, and you get in the habit of sleeping curled up together, breathing in her skin, her hairy legs brushing against yours. (She doesn’t shave her armpits, either. You asked her once about this, and she shrugged and said she liked it better that way.)

 “I love you,” she says one night. She says it with such intense earnestness, like a child professing their belief in Santa Claus and simultaneously like a scientist professing empirical truth, and you don’t even know what kind of love she means, and you don’t even know how you feel about it, if you can find it in your black sea of a heart to reciprocate--

 “Don’t say that,” you answer reflexively. You have dealt out dozens of these rejections. This one is different. This one hurts.

 “Oh,” she says, quieter than before. She thinks a moment. “Okay.”

You scramble for time, for words, for an explanation. “It’s not that-

 “It’s okay,” she says again. She smoothes your hair. “It’s okay.”

 It never comes up again, not for all the moments you share and words you exchange. You can never find the right word for your relationship, can never figure out the most convenient packaging to present it to the outside world, and it stops mattering. The two of you reached some tacit understanding long ago. Even as the world goes to hell, that is enough. 

 And does the world ever go to hell. 

 If your life were ever made into a book or a film, you’d hope it would be something with a tasteful literary, slightly dark (Lovecraftian?) bent. Then it turns out an alien sea queen is intent on conquering the planet, and you know in an instant that your fate will be horribly gauche. 

 Both of you do your part admirably. You return to NYC, smash some mirrors, write “death to the batterwitch” on every available surface in your lipstick (matte black, always matte black). Jade suspends all business activities and stays on in your living room, acquiring more electronic equipment. From what she tells you, you gather she’s coordinating cyberattacks. You write furiously, with a political bent this time. You also recommence your correspondence with Strider with renewed vigor.

 None of it seems to do much good. 

 It’s exhausting in a horrible way to watch the world go to hell around you. You spend a lot of time drinking, leaning against Jade, even falling asleep in her lap as she types out the next strategy, the next attack.  All you can do is sharpen your knitting needles and steel your resolve to fight.

 What she tells you that morning changes your entire world.

 “I need to go,” she says. All finality, no smiles.

 “Where?” you ask as your gaze slips to the bags under her eyes.

 “Somewhere safe.”

 “Here _is safe!_ ” you spit back.

 “Somewhere safer.”

 “Why?”

 Her face crumples, and she refuses to respond. You go to her, hold her, hug her furiously. She presses her lips to the crown of your head and takes a shaky breath. You’re gently swaying now, like that night in Hollywood years ago, dancing under the lights. 

 “It’s going to get worse,” she finally whispers. 

 Your fingers comb through her hair. “And I can’t come with you.”

 “No.”

 “I never thought I would be the one who stays behind,” you say. You sound more piteously mournful than you planned to. 

 She pulls away enough to look her in the eye. “Please stay. Please fight. For me.”

 You can only nod and hold her tighter.

* * *

 Jade leaves in the night. 

 

You remain in communication for several years, but you never see her in person again.

 

You hope she is proud of the way you die.


End file.
